This week Peter and I discuss the usefulness of learning the popular Object Relational Mapping (ORM) solutions for ColdFusion. There are a small group of solutions with Transfer being the most widely known but which also include Reactor and DataFaucet. Indeed, it has already been announced that ColdFusion 9 (Centaur) will include Hibernate integration.

It's nice to be back in the world of ColdFusion at work, if temporarily. I am working on an idea for a Flex project where I am toying with using both ColdSpring and Transfer. For reasons I won't get into here, I wanted to try creating a generic base DAO that could handle all my CRUD via Transfer. This DAO would handle creating the Transfer object, populating it and inserting, updating or deleting it. However, I didn't want anything calling this base DAO to know that it used Transfer, I just wanted to pass a table name and a struct of properties. Here's what I came up with.

Five new projects and three updates this week plus no less than nine Transfer related posts...eesh. Sorry this post is a little late but I was sick once again. I wish I could say that it was due to a weekend of heavy partying but alas I haven't partied that hard in many, many years. This week was a busy week, with some very interesting new projects. In particular, Razuna is another in a growing number of POSS projects in ColdFusion and sounds interesting.

Three new projects and eight updates this week including Transfer 1.0, Todd Sharp's iLearn learning management system and Barney Boisvert's interesting Groovy integration proof-of-concept. So, this was a good week for ColdFusion and open-source, especially given Railo's recent announcement..

Mark Mandel covers the theory of caching and what problems it solves and then discusses, in detail, how Transfer addresses caching. The main problem, obviously, is that some aspects of your code can be "expensive" such as retrieving large datasets from the database or converting large data sets into components. Caching addresses this by storing information on disk or in memory so as not to have to repeat the expensive portion of the code.